GW2 – Path of Fire Demo, The Rage-Quittening

I’m going to try really hard not to sound bitter, angry, and resentful as I write this. :)

I’m home today so I logged into GW2 to try out this Path of Fire demo thing. At first I had no idea how to even participate.

I logged into my Necro, who I had left in Orr outside of the Zhaitan dungeon. Last time I played, I tried to do that last personal story mission to kill Zhaitan. Hoo boy what a mistake that was, but that’s another story. The point is that when I logged in, I was in the middle of one of those Orr events where everything in the area is trying to murder you and I got killed over and over and over again before I could even run far enough away to teleport away from it. So that was a great start.

I logged out again. I noted on Twitter that no other MMORPG makes me as angry as GW2 when I play it. The way the game kills you again and again, knocking you around like a pinball, just feels so bleepity-bleeping unfair.

Okay, true, I obviously don’t know any of the “meta” or any of the best builds or anything about anything. I don’t even have my dodge key bound correctly. I saw another player running around in the same Orr death zone that I was in who didn’t seem to be having nearly as much trouble as I was, so obviously I am doing something fundamentally wrong when I play this game. But frankly I don’t care to figure out what I am doing wrong. The game makes me so angry in the way it punishes the player that I just want to tell it to bleep the bleep off and bleep it’s bleeping bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

Deep breaths. Anyway.

With some Twitter help I finally discovered you have to make a new “demo” character to participate in the Path of Fire demo. It’s really, really easy to overlook this in the interface. There’s a “Create (demo)” button in the lower right corner which I completely missed. There’s also two extra “demo” character slots where you can make characters, but I didn’t even see them because I already have so many character slots I had to scroll over to the right to even see them.

I made another Necro character. I picked a random-looking long-white-haired human dude. He has the exact same voice as my long-suffering bald human Necro from launch, which is very weird.

I started out on an airship, another one of those fantasy airships that obviously looks like it could never fly because of the basic principle that most things are heavier than air but we just go with it because it looks cool and *hand wave* “it’s magic.”

Once the airship lands you walk off the deck into a cave or something and right into a massive fight with … bad guys that you will probably understand if you’ve played the Living Story Season 3. Unfortunately I haven’t, so they are totally random and arbitrary bad guys to me. It is a typical GW2 fight-totally chaotic, a million bad guys throwing a million AoEs and other effects at you all simultaneously. I died.

After a couple more deaths, me and my NPC Charr lieutenant (a completely unknown character to me) finally cleared the room. At this point I noticed that I had a bunch of gear boxes in my inventory. I opened one and it exploded into a new set of gear. I started to put it on, but of course with every piece you have to “Select Stats” and of course I have no clue what to pick. Even if I did, you have to do it for every single piece. So I gave up on that and just kept the default gear, staff, and scepter.

A Herald of Balthazar arrived. There was some conversation between us that made no sense to me, since I know nothing about the story leading up to this point. Of course this turned into a boss fight. I died again. Eventually we drove off the Herald of Balthazar and my character (“The Commander”) declared that he was going to follow it. (Something that I, the player, had NO desire to do.) I followed, fought some more, listened to some more dialog from the Herald that made no sense out of context, a thousand other mobs appeared in a burning village and I died again.

Then I rage quit so that I could write this post.

I mean, I just don’t understand this game at all. I don’t understand how it’s even possible for people to have fun playing this game at level 80. It’s nothing but work and chores and more work and more chores to fight and claw your way through nonsensical fights to see a story. And they just keeping doubling-down on it, time after time after time.

So someone please make a video or a blog post or something with step-by-step instructions on how to casually enjoy this game at level 80, because I’m obviously not getting it. :)

Update: I did better on the second try. :)